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Sunday, May 10, 2015

Weekly Roundup - Conferences, Compliance, and Freddie Gray

Happy Mother's Day. I planted lilacs, and then together we filled in our flower and vegetable garden. This morning, I'm making two kinds of crepes - sweet (with nutella or fruit or jam) and speck + cheese savory ones. I also ground a lamb leg recently and made sausage, and am considering whether some of that meat might go into dinner in some fashion.

On Thursday, I'll be heading off to a huge annual conference, the International Medieval Congress at Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo, MI. About three thousand medievalists will be there, which will include professors and students, but also just people who like the Middle Ages. I'll be talking about being a public medievalist, and plan to post something important about changing registers (public/private) and raising stakes, so please watch for that.

Conferences are the reason I have a scholarly career. I am grateful to them and to the people who made them possible. Rants like the NYT piece emerge from a kind of Princeton Privilege (and other elite R1s) in which sharing ennui in the paper of record seems like a good idea, but is really a form of punching down.